SEXUAL ANARCHY: From temptation to tolerance to approval

by Bill Muehlenberg

News Weekly, December 25, 2010

Group love - or polyamory - is now all the rage, and the polyamorists are especially emboldened and pleased with the way things are progressing. They especially love the fact that all the groundwork has already been prepared for them by the push to normalise homosexuality and legalise same-sex marriage.

Dr Linda Kirkman

All the arguments have been made, and all the social softening-up has occurred. Polyamorists can now just traipse in on the coattails of the homosexual lobby, and easily demand equal treatment. They really don't have to do a thing.

The reason for this is quite simple: the argument for same-sex marriage is the argument for group marriage. It is exactly the same - same "logic", same rationale, same shouts of discrimination, the same sob stories.

Once we argue that sex acts between two men are on a par with opposite-gender sex, then the argument for any other type of sex is much easier to make. And once we destroy the fundamental nature and definition of marriage by including same-sex couples, then any similar demand will be impossible to resist.

Dr Linda Kirkman, of Melbourne's prestigious La Trobe University has recently published her case for group love. Linda and her sister Maggie have been at the cutting edge of radical social change here in Australia for quite some time. In 1988, Linda carried Maggie's baby as Australia's first IVF surrogate mother.

So no real surprises here. The sexual liberationists who seek to break sexual taboos and denigrate sexual restrictions will always find new causes to champion. Group "love" is just the next logical cause to rally around. Just consider how this academic justifies all this sexual anarchy: "The more aware and accepting of diversity in relationships the more healthy our society is.

"Adaptability to social change makes us more resilient and healthy as a society. Discrimination and stigma based on sexual orientation or family type diminishes us.

"I look forward to a society where any loving family, irrespective of how many people it includes or what sex they are, feels safe to be open about who they are."

Fortunately, there have been plenty of great intellects over the centuries who have rightly scoffed at this ludicrous notion that healthy societies can continue while allowing complete laissez-faire when it comes to sexuality. Consider a few such thinkers:

Noted political philosopher J. Budziszewski, said in his important volume, The Revenge of Conscience (1999):

"Consider just the domain of sexual practice. First, we were to approve sex before marriage, then without marriage, now against marriage. First with one, then with a series, now with a crowd. First with the other sex, then with the same. First between adults, then between children, then between adults and children.

"As sin passes through its stages from temptation to tolerance to approval, its name is first euphemised, then avoided, then forgotten. A colleague tells me that some of his fellow scholars call child molestation 'intergenerational intimacy'. That's euphemism. A good-hearted editor tried to talk me out of using the term 'sodomy': that's avoidance. My students don't know the meaning of the word 'fornication' at all: that's forgetfulness."

Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin wrote in 1956, "This sex revolution is as important as the most dramatic political or economic upheaval. It is changing the lives of men and women more radically than any other revolution of our time. ... Any considerable change in marriage behaviour, any increase in sexual promiscuity and sexual relations, is pregnant with momentous consequences. A sex revolution drastically affects the lives of millions, deeply disturbs the community, and decisively influences the future of society."

J.D. Unwin of Cambridge University has argued that marriage is seen as the crucial element in the development and maintenance of healthy societies: "The whole of human history does not contain a single instance of a group becoming civilised unless it has been completely monogamous, nor is there any example of a group retaining its culture after it has adopted less rigorous customs.

"Marriage as a life-long association has been an attendant circumstance of all human achievement, and its adoption has preceded all manifestations of social energy. ... Indissoluble monogamy must be regarded as the mainspring of all social activity, a necessary condition of human development."

Will and Ariel Durant, writing in The Lessons of History (1968), warned: "The sex drive in the young is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group."

Or, as G.K. Chesterton once reminded us, "A society that claims to be civilised and yet allows the sex instinct free-play is inoculating itself with a virus of corruption which sooner or later will destroy it. It is only a question of time."

For years now I have been warning that once we legalise same-sex marriage, the next inevitable step will be polyamory, and/or group marriage. I am always decried and dismissed as a nutter for daring to state the obvious.

Bill Muehlenberg is a commentator on contemporary issues, and lectures on ethics and philosophy. His website CultureWatch is at: www.billmuehlenberg.com